


Cihuateteo: Divine Women

by used_songs



Category: Aztec Religion
Genre: Colonialism, F/F, Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:00:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/used_songs/pseuds/used_songs
Summary: Every evening, as the sun falls into the West, the Cihuateteo meet and talk, argue, braid their hair, make love, cook, eat, drink, lay back and feel the earth, listen, worry, make love again, recline in the steam, and laugh about the vagaries of humanity. Each of them has fought and lost, fought the gods for the chance to have a child and lost and therefore each one has walked the road from mortal to immortal. Nothing left to fear. Nothing but the endless sweep of time, cycling, to carry you.





	Cihuateteo: Divine Women

Every evening, as the sun falls into the West, the Cihuateteo meet and talk, argue, braid their hair, make love, cook, eat, drink, lay back and feel the earth, listen, worry, make love again, recline in the steam, and laugh about the vagaries of humanity. Each of them has fought and lost, fought the gods for the chance to have a child and lost and therefore each one has walked the road from mortal to immortal. Nothing left to fear. Nothing but the endless sweep of time, cycling, to carry you.

 

Xochiquetzal sits down, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “What day is it?”

“One Deer.” Huixtocihuatl sighs. “How do you never know the date when the calendar is wheeling right above you?” She inclines her head, lets her long hair fall against Xochiquetzal’s shoulder. It tickles like tiny lizards running over her skin. The yellow flowers dip and sway. “But it doesn’t matter. Time is like air, like water. There is always more.”

“Your hair is tangled, my love. Let me brush it out for you and braid it.” Xochiquetzal is affectionate, raising her hand softly. “Let me twist it and tie it up on your head, two darling horns to ride your crown.” She brushes her fingers over Huixtocihuatl’s ayate shirt, her brightly dyed and pleated skirt. The soft skin of her ankles. The heels and toes of her beautiful feet. The imprint that her soles have made upon the ground. The intriguing salt of her sweat. Sacred.

Above, a quetzal bird cries in the night sky, the song twisting like smoke. Below, the roots go down into the deep earth. Huixtocihuatl turns her face, her cheeks burnished with yellow paint, and her bells ring lightly. She raises fingers to Xochiquetzal’s mouth, invites her to open her lips. They both smile.

 

Xochiquetzal sits down, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “What day is it?”

“One Rain.” The stone calendar hangs in the sky above, obscuring stars and shimmering. Citlālicue reaches up to take down the stars and wind them through her weaving.

“And do you wear snakes at your waist in order to impress someone, my friend?” Citlālicue merely laughs. “Here,” Xochiquetzal says, and she hands her a xoctli of hot pozole. The smell makes Citlālicue’s mouth water. There is another of nopales, slimy and sour, the life-sustaining water of the cactus. Delicious. It will always be like this, water hiding in the thorns.

“My love, don’t ever let me forget how beautiful the night sky is. I never want to be so jaded that I forget to look up.” Xochiquetzal stretches and then looks serious. “You know there are new human now, my love? Have you heard them along the shore? On the islands?”

Citlālicue sighs. “I know.”

“Are you sorry that you helped to make us?”

“A little. But then I would have no offerings. No stories. No you.”

 

Xochiquetzal sits down, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “What day is it?”

“One Monkey.” Tlazolteotl, the four sister one, the one four sister, stretches, the feathers in their hair bouncing. In the distance, beyond the edge of the market and the ball court, they can see the great stone wheel of time brushing the tree tops as it slowly spins.

“Where have you been, my loves?”

Tlazolteotl laughs, each holding the others in their mirth. “Did you see those fools in their metal clothing? Their ridiculous hats? Their hideous dead white corpse faces?”

“You laugh but there are some who think they’re gods.”

 They scoff. “Their dirty ships, their ugly eyes, their inexplicable language. They are shit, filth, excrement.”

The people begin to be afraid of them. They are taking the gold of the kings, emptying out our people’s treasures.”

“As if!” She laughs. “Drink your pulque!”

“I don’t drink pulque.”

“Haughty. You like that fancy cacao, huh? More for me.”

“Mmmmm, cacao and honey and chile.” She licks her lips, doing it again when she notices Tlazolteotl watching avidly. “You should put all of your arms around me, open all of your thighs for me.”

 

Xochiquetzal sits down, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “What day is it?”

 “One House.” Huixtocihuatl looks at her. “You have never learned to tell time, and now it’s too late.”

“It is night. Look how the darkness spreads out its wings. The tzitzimimeh will be here soon from Tamoanchan.” Xochiquetzal feels a melancholy, a deep sad song inside, something lost and gone forever. The fresh grass. The cool water. The pollen from the maize. The aqueducts. The stone. The bright colors. They sit in silence, fingers twined together, for a long time listening to the stars.

There is a step just outside the fire light, paper flowers tumbling aside, and the tzitzimimeh enter the room.

“My dark, glassy butterfly, Itzpapalotl! You’ve come to see us!”

Itzpapalotl bows her skeleton’s head and pulls her wings back, the white flint tips scraping the swept ground. “My love.”

“Have you eaten any men lately, beloved?” Xochiquetzal asks playfully.

In her pained white voice, stones trickling over bones, Itzpapalotl replies, “Come kiss me, precious flower precious feather. Come kiss me and make my blood sing.”

A turkey calls from among the trees. Wings beat the dust from the ground as he dances. The birds dart around the stone wheel that lies forgotten against the trees, inclined and still.

 

Xochiquetzal sits down, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “What day is it?”

 “One Eagle.” Chicunaui itzcuintli smiles at her.

“My lady spicy chile,” Xochiquetzal says fondly. “When I kiss you will you make my lips tingle?”

“Try me and see.” They kiss, long and sweet in the death of the day. Their lips tingle, then fingers pressed between them, then fingers reaching lower down. Then Xochiquetzal pulls back and sighs, pressing one long brown hand against her breast. Looks at the darkening skies, looks out across the still water, looks at the lanterns in the distance, the stone steps, the moving branches of the trees. “I feel like …”

“Like what, my love?”

“Like I am trapped inside a glass box, on a pillar, stared at, all of my colors stripped away.” She pauses. “Like what I am will be ground on the metate until there is nothing left of me but crumbled stone.”

Chantico (because of course the lady of nine dogs is more commonly called Chantico) lifts up a snail and scratched its shell, white line, against the stone hearth idly. “If it happens, then it happens,” she says. “We don’t know what new world is coming now that the strangers are here. There is even a new religion, some young thing that burns with dangerous passion.”

“I have heard that the only woman they revere is the mother of their god. There are no others. Our Lady this and Our Lady that.”

“How can that be? Women are the beginning of everything, the origin. There is no story without women.”

“But if they chip away our glyphs? What then? What happens to our time?”

“The death of the Old World, I suppose.”

 

“The stars are going out, Mictēcacihuātl,” Xochiquetzal says sadly. “Can’t you put your skin back together and turn back the calendar?”

Mictēcacihuātl gestures silently toward the shattered stones.

“Please stop eating the stars, my beloved,” Xochiquetzal begs. “I don’t want this new age. My time is honey, sticky. My time is the lanterns on the boats that ring Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. My time is Chapultepec spring water and copalxocotl root as we recline in the steam of the temāzcalli. I don’t want these conquerors.”

Mictēcacihuātl opens her arms, opens her skin, so that Xochiquetzal can climb in and be forgotten.

 


End file.
